Egret in Flight

A couple of days ago I went out to a number of potential birding spots to see what I could photograph. I was hoping to capture an egret or two at a shallow pond less than 10 minutes from my home. Lady Luck smiled upon me and I was able to photograph an egret in flight.

It was quite a nice morning with good light and no wind, allowing me to cautiously approach the egret to capture the image above. I knew that as soon as it noticed me it would likely take flight so I adjusted my settings accordingly (AF-C with subject tracking, 20 frames per second, Manual mode with Auto-ISO 160-6400, VR off). I also shortened my focal length to allow for the wingspan of the egret.

I quickly fired off my AF-C burst but unfortunately I didn’t frame the first few photographs quite right. Nevertheless I did get some nice images further into the AF-C run as illustrated in this article.

You’ll notice that when using a fast frame rate of 20-fps there is only a modest amount of difference in the wing positions in successive images when photographing a large bird with slower wing movements.

I captured another 10 photographs before my buffer filled. There were some distracting reflections on the surface of the water towards the end of the AF-C run which made the images unusable.

Capturing this series of photographs of the egret taking flight was a great way to start my morning. The other stops I made at other locations later that day were not very fruitful.

Technical Note:
All photographs were captured hand-held using Nikon 1 gear as per the EXIF data. All images were produced from RAW files using my standard process of DxO PhotoLab, CS6, and the Nik Collection.

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2 thoughts on “Egret in Flight”

Thanks Joni, I’m glad you enjoyed the images! We do get some egrets up here in Southern Ontario but they can be somewhat difficult to find. Often times even if we do spot them we’re too far away to get any decent photographs.
Tom